John Patrick Green on Creating Graphic Novels and Making Kids Laugh

A podcast interview with John Patrick Green discussing the Investogators and Agents of S.U.I.T series on The Growing Readers Podcast, a production of The Children’s Book Review.

Join us for a delightful conversation with John Patrick Green, creator of the bestselling InvestiGators series.

John shares how his journey from a young artist copying Garfield comics led to becoming one of today’s most beloved graphic novelists. Learn about his unique creative process, which involves space staring, apartment pacing, and having Star Trek episodes playing in the background while he works.

John discusses the evolution of his career, the collaborative process behind his books, and why he believes making kids laugh is the key to fostering a love of reading. He also addresses common misconceptions about graphic novels and shares invaluable advice for young artists. Whether you’re a parent, educator, or young creator, this episode offers wonderful insights into the world of children’s literature and the power of combining art with storytelling to engage young readers.

Plus, discover how a ghost named G.I. Tract and a parade of peculiar characters, including Moss Man and Moose Man, made their way into his latest book, Wild Ghost Chase, from the Agents of S.U.I.T. series.

Subscribe to The Growing Readers Podcast to ensure you never miss an episode celebrating the creators shaping young readers’ lives.

Listen to the Episode

Read the Transcript

Bianca Schulze Well, welcome to the Growing Readers podcast, John. It’s such a pleasure to have you here for the first time.

John Patrick Green Thanks for having me.

Bianca Schulze I am hoping that we can just kind of start with a question to try and get to know you just a little bit before we dive into your books. But I would love to know what is one thing that you do in your day-to-day practices that you think would be the most surprising or the most relatable for our listeners?

John Patrick Green That’s a good question. I think a lot of times, I do the normal stuff, make coffee, have a bowl of cereal. I’d say that, I don’t know if this is the most unusual sort of thing, but like a lot of people work listening to podcasts, that’s how they get their day started. Me, it’s often I just put on old Star Trek episodes.

Bianca Schulze Love it.

John Patrick Green Comfy place. So I would say 90% of the writing and drawing that I do in the background is Star Trek.

Bianca Schulze I love it. Is there like a specific go-to episode or?

John Patrick Green No, I’d say like The Next Generation is primarily the series that I grew up with. Like when I was a little kid, my mom would have reruns of the original Kirk and Spock episodes on TV. And then but I was like, I think I was maybe 13 when Next Generation started and I watched the whole thing. So for those like seven years, that’s like, you know, the time that you’re becoming a person.

You know, from like 13, from like starting junior high all the way until starting college. So it just brings me back to a place where I feel like I was very, very creative as I was developing my skills as what I wanted to do as an artist, what I wanted to draw, what types of stories I

Bianca Schulze I love that. Well, I also know that you do a lot of space staring and apartment pacing while you’re working. So I’m so curious about how this particular creative process has maybe led to any particular or memorable story ideas.

John Patrick Green Well, I do. That is another thing I do. I do have a tendency when I’m writing, especially to like sit down and I’ll stare at the computer and then I’ll think of like one thing and I’ll type it out or whatever. And then I’ll pace around my apartment for 10 or 20 minutes, just trying to process what I just came up with and how to make it work. A lot of times it just leads to a very, very, very, very silly wordplay or just something that seemed obvious at the moment or like an idea for a bad guy. I’ll see a thing or it’ll make me think of a thing. I let my mind wander and I’ll just think of like, you know, a monkey or like rhyming words, you know, like so the current book I’m working on has like monkeys in it, but they were just in my brain. They’re just monkeys. And then I was just thinking like, well, what if they were monkeys?

Flying monkeys and they were monkeys with jetpacks. And that made me think of different types of monkeys. And I thought about how there are capuchins and there are also macaques. And the word macaque kind of looks like jetpack. Like if you spell pack like macaque, it’s jet-pacock. Like that’s just where my mind goes. It just goes to really, really bizarre places sometimes.

Bianca Schulze Thank you! Yeah, I love that. And I know I’ve said it, I don’t know which episode I’ve said it in, but one of my favorite sort of Ernest Hemingway lessons was that whenever you’re stuck and you don’t know what to write, just start with one true thing. And like that sounds like that’s your practice is like the truest thing that comes to your mind in the moment.

John Patrick Green Yeah, yeah. Yeah, just like picking anything, just thinking like whatever, like a lot of times the best way to write is to not think about writing, which is why for me usually, like I just like feeling productive. So even if I’m having a day where I’m supposed to be writing, so long as I actually get something done, even if it’s not writing, if I get something done during my day, like.

I’ll try to write and I’ll be like, you know, I need to pace around the apartment and then I’ll just start doing dishes or I’ll do laundry or whatever. And doing those things just make my mind, you know, relax and, you know, and I have this sense of being productive. I have this sense that I’m accomplishing something and in a way that kind of motivates my writing juices, I guess you could say. And then stuff just starts coming out, you know.

Bianca Schulze Yeah. Yeah. So do you write every single day?

John Patrick Green Not really. I’d say, I guess it depends on how you classify writing. Like my mind is always working. You know, you can, I can turn my brain off and then like go to bed and then suddenly something will hit me and I have to go write it down or I’ll forget it. And then, and so the question is, was that writing? Did I write anything or did it just have an idea and put it down?

You know, people will classify writing as like taking all your ideas and finally forming them into a narrative or a story or a plot line or whatever. So like when it comes to that, when I’m like, when I think about, know, kids will ask me how long does it take to write a book? And I’m usually like, well, you know, can be as quick as like two weeks or it can take, you know, four months. You know, it just depends on how you classify each of those days. I’d say I’m creative every day in one way or another but whether or not I feel like I’ve written anything on any given day is a different matter altogether.

Bianca Schulze Yeah, I love that. Well, I hear that you started your career as an artist who kind of accidentally became a writer. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about your journey and how you came to be this bestselling graphic novelist?

John Patrick Green Yeah, well, started when I was a little kid. I didn’t have really great health when I was little. I very bad asthma and allergies and stuff. And I’d miss a lot of school and be home. And this was a long, long time ago before there were fewer opportunities for a kid to entertain themselves when they’re home. And they’re stuck in bed. We couldn’t play on our phones or play video games, right?

So I just basically have to read or like draw, like, you know, all kids, you know, when they’re like five, six years old, they’re drawing, right? And so my favorite things to read were comic strips in the newspapers. And I was kind of, you know, enamored by this method of storytelling that used pictures and words, you know, and at the time it’s comic strips. So it’s just telling jokes, but they’re still really stories, you know, they have beginnings, middles and ends with the little pictures.

And I kind of gave, I liked drawing, but I was always asking people, well, what should I draw? Tell me something to draw. I didn’t like coming up with things to draw. I just liked being able to draw a thing and people would tell me like, draw this or draw that or whatever. And so I was always looking for a purpose for my drawing and telling a story seemed to be a good purpose. So as I got older and made it through, I was like nine, 10, 11. I originally started by just drawing copies of Garfield comic strips, but eventually my mom called me out on copyright infringement and she was like, you should create your own characters. And so I did and I started creating my own characters and I started making comic strips and coming up with my own jokes. And then eventually I started doing longer comic books and would come up with storylines, but I never thought of it as writing because to me it was just the means to an end of giving myself something to draw. I was like, I’m an artist. I’m just coming up with this so that I can draw it. I’m not writing anything. That’s the way I viewed it as a kid. And it wasn’t until much later when I was like an actual professional, like working for Disney and stuff. And I actually started writing comics for them.

John Patrick Green Before I was drawing them. I was doing art stuff like coloring comics and placing lettering and production work, but I started writing comics before I was drawing them. And that was around the time when it kind of dawned on me that I’d been a writer this whole time, even though the drawing was where my passion was.

Bianca Schulze Yeah, yeah, I love that. I love that. And then, so you’re working for Disney and I know you’ve worked for some other really big companies. Like at what point did you have your first graphic novel ready to go?

John Patrick Green Well, it kind of started in college. I went to School of Visual Arts. And shortly after I started there, like I was majoring in graphic design because I was kind of a little bit of a pragmatic kid. And I was like, I’m not going to art school to learn how to draw. I’m going there to get a job. And the graphic design department had the highest employment rate when I was going.

But I still loved comics and there were a lot of like comics legends teaching at the school. And so I would take their classes as just electives. And shortly after starting there, met this other kid named Dave Roman who was really in the comics. And he kind of inspired me, he and a couple of other of his friends inspired me to start like drawing my own comics just for fun.

And in my third year at School of Visual Arts, I was taking a class and one of the assignments was to create a comic book or like to draw a full length, like 22 page, like Batman or Daredevil comic book. But we were given the opportunity to come up with our own story if we wanted. And so I said to my friend Dave, was like, hey, why don’t you write a comic that I would draw? And then maybe after that, we’ll actually publish it. Because we have this teacher Klaus Jansen. He’s known for like Batman, The Dark Knight Returns and Daredevil, all these other things. And he would basically be like the editor of this book. I was like, this is a perfect opportunity.

John Patrick Green So that was technically like my first comic, you know, with a collaborator that was like an actual book, but it was still like self-published and everything. And it wasn’t until after, you know, and then shortly after college, I got a job at Disney. And so that kind of took up most of my time. And then when the Disney work ended, I ended up doing like a lot of production work for other publishers like Scholastic and Macmillan First Second.

And so I knew people and editors and stuff. And so, you know, just when a lot of the freelance work that I had started drying up, I was like, well, maybe I should, if I have an idea for a book, I should just pitch it to one of these editors because I know them well enough that they’re not going to make me jump through hoops with finding an agent first and this stuff like that. So I was kind of lucky on that, that regard. And I just had this idea for this kid’s comic book, a kids graphic novel Hippopotamister. And so that is kind of like my first book that I consider like the one that was like my, you know, like just all me basically. Like I had a colorist help with it, but I came up with the story and I did the original drawings where prior to that, it was all collaborative efforts.

Like I did a, you know, I previously did a book called Teen Boat, again with Dave Roman, that was, it started out as a little mini comic that we would just draw and photocopy it. But then Clarion, back when they existed, liked it enough to do a collection of it. But it still felt like a remnant of my college days, my self-publishing days, where my friends and I, we were just making a silly little comic to make us laugh. And then someone else came along and said, we like this enough to publish it. You know, it wasn’t created initially to be a book. You know, just ended up being the end result of it. So, Hippopotamister for me is like my first real, I feel.

Bianca Schulze I love that. And now I want a tangent just for a second, because you said that you felt like you had enough contacts in the industry and so you didn’t need an agent. Do you have an agent now or are you still unagented?

John Patrick Green No, I do now. Like when I was doing Hippopotamister, I was still doing a lot of freelance designing books for First Second, and I was lettering books for Scholastic Graphics, and I was designing fonts for a lot of comic creators so that they had fonts based off of their own handwriting and things like that. I had a lot of freelance going on.

And you know, when I was doing my own books, like Hippopotamister and then after that did two books in a series called Kitten Construction Company, I basically just had like a full year to draw like a 70 page book, which, you know, I work very, very fast. So it wasn’t a big commitment. And these were just essentially sold as like one-offs. And so, you know, I was friends with my editor. You know, we had known each other for a very long time.

So I was just like, eh, you give me a very simple contract, I can read it and that’s fine. You know, so long as the advance seems reasonable, I’m like, I’m good, whatever. And then when they had asked me if I had ideas for a chapter book series, that’s when I started coming up with Investigators and they were like, you know, we want like a long series. So come up with like, you know, pitch ideas for like a three book series.

And I was like, well, I’m going to pitch five books because I want the job security, right? And so I pitched the five books and they’re like, these are great. We love it. We want all five of them. And they’re like, can you do two of these a year? And so I was going and I’m like, sure, I can do that. But I was going from having a lot of freelance and then having a full year to write and draw a 70 page graphic novel to now being asked to write and draw two 200 page graphic novels in one year.

John Patrick Green And so I told them, I can do that, but I would have to quit all the freelance that I do for you as well as everyone else. And they were like, we’re cool with that. We want these books. And then they made the offer, like the actual offer, which the advance for each book was for each 200 page book that I had to do in six months each was marginally higher than the advance for one 70 page book. So when they got that, when I got that offer, was like, Hey, editor who I’ve known for like a decade, would you be upset with me if I went off and found an agent now? And she was like, no, you really should.

And I was like, I’m going to find an agent. And I had worked with one or two agents on other projects before, which weren’t always the best experiences. So I asked some friends, I was like, can you recommend any, give me a list of agents that you know people enjoy working with, or you’d recommend, or whatever. Because for me, I had very specific requirements for what I wanted from an agent. And so I got this list of five or six names. And I basically just called them or emailed all of them being like, hey, I have a five-book deal. Can I talk to you about being an agent? And they all got back to me immediately. I’ve had a very, very bizarre way of getting my foot in the different doors of publishing when it comes to…

Bianca Schulze I love it. Like, there’s no one pathway to do anything. I love finding out everybody’s path and how they get to where they are. It’s just such an adventure. So I loved hearing that story. But now we’re hearing, like, so you’ve got colorists that help on graphic novels. And obviously, you are creating a lot of books now because the Investigators now has the spinoff series which is The Agents of S.U.I.T or do you prefer to say the agents of SUIT?

John Patrick Green I would say suit. It’s funny, not to go off on too big a tangent, but kids will always ask because they’re like, well, there are periods there, so shouldn’t we say all the letters? Whereas I’m like, well, it’s very inconsistent when it comes to acronyms because an acronym like FBI, you don’t put periods in the acronym FBI, but you say FBI. And of course a word like scuba is an acronym, but everyone, it’s become such a common word that everyone just says scuba.

And there’s no periods. And I’m like, well, I want everyone to know it’s an acronym. So I have to put the periods, but I want them to say suit because it’s funny. It’s like the vest, the very exciting spy technology that they wear. It’s the way you say vest. But then there are times when like, I want a character to like kind of say like, you mean a V-E-S-T, you know, for the gag or whatever.

Bianca Schulze Yeah, exactly. Yeah, well, I really wanted to wear a V-E-S-T, a vest for our podcast today, but I realized the only one I had was like a big giant puffy one, which wouldn’t have worked so great for the sound every time I moved.

John Patrick Green I don’t even think I have a vest. Or a waistcoat as they’re otherwise known in different regions.

Bianca Schulze You might need to fix that. Yeah. Well, so let’s talk about like just this process of a graphic novel. Like now you actually have co-authors and I mean, it’s such a collaborative process. So like in a nutshell, like what does this process look like for you now when you sit down to create a graphic novel?

John Patrick Green It definitely varies between when I’m working on a book and working with a collaborator. So for Investigators, the main series, I write and I draw, and then I have a colorist. So it’s a pretty streamlined process. Initially, when I started working on the series, I would write out an outline of the whole book, which is just like bullet points of what’s going to happen. And then I would kind of script it in my head as I’m drawing thumbnails, you know, little sketches of every page.

And it definitely still kind of varies between book to books. Like sometimes I’ll do others where I’m like doing little sketches and other times I’m just thinking of the words and I’m typing them out. I’m always looking for ways to streamline the process. So now when I’m actually writing a book and scripting a book, I just start lettering the book. So instead of something that looks like a TV movie script kind of format, I just have blank pages of the book and I’m typing them on computer in the actual font so that I can see how big the words are on the page. Because if you’re typing on a regular word processor, you’re going to get words that you can’t tell just how big they’re, how much space they’re going to take up on the page of a comic.

And I don’t like the pages to be too crowded. So I’ll end up just writing on blank pages. And so the first time nowadays, the first time you can read the book, it’s just like, imagine there’s no art or anything whatsoever. You just see all the dialogue balloons, which is hard to read because you can’t tell who’s saying what. Like I can tell because I know, but no one else can.

John Patrick Green So that’s how I work now. And then once the script is done, then I do the art. And then it streamlines just how many times I have to draw the art over and over again, knowing exactly how much space I have. When I’m doing them for other people, working with a collaborator with Agents of Suits, since we have a co-writer, usually we get together, like, you know, a virtual meeting, right, with me and the editor and the co-writer and then the artist, Pat Lewis.

Because he has to draw it so I want him to have questions about like if he wants to say that I don’t want to have to draw a hundred horses, you know, like in a scene. So we’re not gonna write something like that for him to have to draw, right? We all have a little virtual meeting and I’ll have ideas of what I want there to be in the book like or like oh, here’s the villain that I want to be in the next book or here’s the specific side character from suit who I want to be the main star of this one, we’ll hash those things out and think of what we wanna do. Do we wanna do a space adventure? Do we wanna do a James Bond type of thing, whatever.

And then sometimes I’ll have bullet points of my own that I’ll pass off to the co-writer who then they will come up with their own outline of that’s often like three or four pages, just again, just describing what happens. And then once we get that approved, usually they’ll start going off scripting and in batches they will send it to me and I will sometimes go in and I’ll spruce things up. Which usually means I will think of something that’s completely absurd that I just think is funny and I’m like, you have to put this in.

Which is always a problem because the first like book or two that the co-writer did, they basically wrote for a 200 page graphic novel. And then I would get it and I would start adding all these things that I thought were funny. And then you end up with like a 250 page graphic novel, which, you know, we’re limited to 200 pages. So now I tell the co-writer, you know, write for like 160, 170. I know once I read it, I’m going to be like, oh, it’ll be funny if this happens to them. And then this and this and this and this, which is usually completely pointless, but I just think it’s funny. And I’m like, that’s really, to me, that’s the main part of the books. I guess they’re funny.

Bianca Schulze Absolutely. That’s what makes it the John Patrick Green book is these absurd, just funny moments and you know.

John Patrick Green Yeah, this is really, really wild. Then, you know, Pat, depending on the schedule, ideally it would be great if we can give Pat the artist like the full script before he has to start drawing anything. But usually we’re kind of behind schedule and we’ll only have like the first 50 pages drawn, like written, and he has to start drawing them. And we have no clue what the ending of the book is going to be.

Yeah, so sometimes we paint ourselves into a corner a little bit. But I did that on the very first Investigators. There are times when I painted myself in the, I wanted the investigators, Mango and Brash, to rescue Gustavo the chef who was kidnapped by Cracker Dial. But I ran out of pages and so he just saves himself. He’s just like, I’ll escape with a spoon. And then he shows up and it’s like, I’m back. Because I ran out of space for them to do that.

Bianca Schulze Yeah, I love it. I love it. Well, like I find your book so entertaining and like I would I mean, would you say that making kids laugh is your driving force behind these books that you write? And if so, like how does that mission shape the way that you approach your storytelling?

John Patrick Green I’d say yes, that making kids laugh. I mean, really, the driving force is making myself laugh. But then now, having done enough books, like we didn’t know with the first few books how kids were going to respond to it. Like when Macmillan, you know, they approached me and I was like, we want a chapter book that is like for seven to 10 year olds, you know, what can you come up with? Because Hippopotamister during Kitten Construction Company, they were early reader graphic novels. So for those, the demographic, the people buying the books were like parents and grandparents and librarians, because they would be reading the book to their kids, you know.

And so this was the first time I’m like making a book where the kids themselves will be the driving force of choosing to read it. And what I did was I was like, I need to get back into my head of what I thought was funny when I was like 10 or years old or so, right? And that was when I was making the most of my comics when I was young. And fortunately, I had saved them all and I had scanned them into the computer and made little printouts. So I had like, I could go back and read all the comics that I made when I was, you know, nine, 10, 11. And it put me back into this mindset of what kind of kid I was and what I thought was funny and what made me laugh.

John Patrick Green And so I was like, if I could just tap into this again and just do these and, you know, whatever makes me feel like a kid while I’m doing them, like, hopefully it’ll work. And it did. And so kids, you know, find them really, really funny. And of course there are plenty of parents and adults who will read stuff and there’s some sly little nods or like little references that work on two levels because it’s something that’s just absurd, so kids will laugh at the picture. But the adults might also be like, that’s actually a reference to this thing. Just knowing after the first few books came out that, yeah, kids are responding to this. And I would go to schools and I would talk to them and they would tell me what they found funny and all this sort of stuff. I was like, this is working. This is whatever I’m doing, it’s making these kids laugh. And just that really, really motivates me, just knowing that they are getting hooked on reading, as you could say, especially when parents and teachers contact me and are like, I could not find something for this kid to read. They wouldn’t read anything until they saw your book and they started laughing at it. I’m like, that just makes me want to make more. So yeah, making kids laugh is the primary motivation.

Bianca Schulze Perfect. Well, your response leads us perfectly into the next question because there’s often so much pressure on kids to read certain types of books or to read in certain ways. So since a lot of our listeners are parents and educators who do want to nurture a love of reading in children, and you have this wonderful perspective that any reading is good reading, what would you say to adults who might be hesitant about graphic novels as real reading?

John Patrick Green I mean, one, would say that they should try it for themselves. There are plenty like nowadays, there are plenty of graphic novels that are made for adults and have different, you know, topics. Could be there are memoirs, there are biographies about like famous people or subjects or politics or whatever. And there is a whole variety of art styles as well.

You know, so I think anyone who enjoys reading can find a graphic novel that is about something that they themselves want to read about. And hopefully that just doing that might, you know, give a, you know, more acceptance that this is a legitimate art form. I do feel that it’s different than reading prose, of course. I think it engages a different part of a person’s brain. And I think that maybe there are a lot of adults, be they parents or whomever, who have this feeling that anything that requires imagery to communicate is somehow lesser. As if that’s to say it taps into a lower part of your brain than the purely, you know, literary part of just seeing words and understanding the words. And I think that kind of does a disservice to people’s imaginations and people’s way of absorbing information.

And so when it comes to kids reading books, I think people don’t appreciate that enthusiasm about doing a thing is very, very important. And being enthusiastic about something that is connected to something that you might be less enthusiastic about is a good thing to have. So if a kid is struggling with reading something that they might have to do for an assignment, whatever it could be, the thing that they have to do a book report about it, if they don’t want to read that, but they’re willing to read something else, I don’t see where the harm is in letting them read that other thing and then maybe they will feel more comfortable or they will just be less apprehensive about reading this other thing. Yeah, like as I’ve said, no matter what you’re reading, it still sort of stretches the reading muscle in your brain. It’s just like practicing anything. You’re just having fun. It’s just like doing puzzle games, right? You know, playing word games or whatever. They’re just fun, really, but they stretch your brain, you know?

Bianca Schulze Yeah, I love that connection too that, you know, like the more a child reads for pleasure, the more the reading experience brings them joy. In those moments where they do have to pick something up that maybe is more of a required reading, you know, yeah, sure, it’s still going to feel like a chore to them, but they have this built in love of reading. And so those moments where reading feels like a chore become easier and easier because you’ve come to reading from a joyful place previously.

John Patrick Green Yeah, it’s similar to how I feel many people are more accepting of like playing role-playing games like D&D and stuff because they’ve realized, well, wait, if you’re playing role-playing games with friends, you have to be able to do math with the stats and all that sort of stuff and all the different numbers with the dice and you know, like so people realize, wait, there’s an angle that we can tap into, like let the kids play these because they will start learning stuff just by having fun doing it. And then they’ll be able to apply that later on. Like learning doesn’t have to be just dry, whatever. It doesn’t have to be facts. It doesn’t just have to be memorizing information. It could be learning in a fun way to use this knowledge.

Bianca Schulze Absolutely. Well, on the topic of joyful graphic novels, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your latest Agents of Suit: Wild Ghost Chase, which introduces us to some, let’s say, pretty unique characters. So I want to know more about this latest novel and what inspired this particular parade of peculiar characters.

John Patrick Green So this is the cover of the new one, Wild Ghost Chase. And from here you can see there’s Solancho who’s in this UFO who, she was featured primarily in the first Agents of Suit, that’s where the UFO came from. Then we have these two badgers, Bongo and Marsha, they’re the B team. This sheep here, his name is Zeb, he’s a new junior agent who kind of just joined around the time of the first book. And then there’s this ghost here and he is the ghost of G.I. Tract.

John Patrick Green He came about purely because in the first Investigators book, there’s a scene where Mango and Brash are, they’re in the suit base, suit headquarters. And they’re leading their way to the general inspector’s office. And the general inspector is basically the head, the head honcho of suit as an organization. And they’re passing by all these different offices. And so there’s like the inspector general and they’re like, no, that’s not it. We want the general inspector. There’s inspector, you know, specific or inspector vague or inspector vogue. And there’s all these like wordplay puns and everything.

So it gave an opportunity to kind of like expand the lore. And I wanted to do a story of, you know, his spirit basically being stuck on this plane of existence, right? Stuck on earth because he didn’t solve his final mystery. You know, you hear all those things like, the spirits, they’re haunting your house because they have left something behind, you know? They need something so that they can move on, right?

And it seemed like a good motivation for him. And so he’s kind of like a, he’s a bit of a bad guy in a way, because he’s kind of like, not sort of a vengeful spirit, but a spirit that feels like he didn’t accomplish what he was supposed to while he was on earth. And I named him G.I. Tract for General Inspector Tract, just because it’s funny. And it’s kind of a little wordplay that adults will get right away, but kids might not catch on to until sometime later. And they’ll be like, wait.

Bianca Schulze I love it. I love it. Why don’t you share like a highlight from the book? Like it could be a favorite quote or maybe it’s, you know, a favorite illustration. Like what’s your highlight from this book?

John Patrick Green For me, one of my favorite bits is it’s another example of a silly thing where I was like, it would be funny if this happens. It really like, takes up like four pages, but it’s really not necessary for the story. But I just thought it was funny where the main mystery involves so General Inspector Tract, he’s back and he’s like, I have to solve the ultimate mystery before I can move on. And so he starts like picking up these unsolved mysteries of like, is the Loch Ness Monster real? Is Bigfoot real? Is Atlantis real? All these basically like cryptids, like the Michigan Dog Man and all that sort of stuff. And there’s this one part where he’s going to track down the Mothman, which is Pittsburgh, I think is a Pittsburgh thing. Or Virginia something. I can’t remember. I’m probably wrong. But yeah, I think it might be Virginia Appalachia. All right. So, and I’m like, well, what if he doesn’t find the Mothman, but he finds the Moss Man, but because the Moss Man is covered in moss, you know, it kind of has a lisp, you know, talking through all this. So he’s saying, I’m, I’m the, I’m the Moth Man. And he’s like, you’re not the Mothman, you’re the Moss Man. And then, so he’s like, have a lisp, don’t make fun of me. And then a character comes in, it’s like, did someone say Moose Man? And it’s another fake cryptid who, or actually no, he’s just like a guy who’s a fan of moose. So he has like a hat with antlers. And they’re like, no, not you, Moose Man. And then this is the one of the most absurd connections I’ve ever made. And then someone comes in and is like, did someone say John Wilkes Booth Man? And it’s a guy just dressed like John Wilkes Booth who’s holding like a flyer with Abe Lincoln with like the no symbol on it. And it makes no sense whatsoever. But I just thought it was funny. And so I’m like, please add a page so that we can have a cryptid named John Wilkes Boothman.

Bianca Schulze I love it. Well, John, thank you so much for joining us today. It has been a delight exploring your creative journey from artist to author and hearing about your mission to bring laughter to young readers through works like Agents of Suit and the Investigator series. Your insight about the value of all forms of reading is particularly wonderful, and I hope our listeners, both young and old, take that message to heart. And the way you’ve integrated art and storytelling, creating engaging graphic novels that captivate young readers while exercising their reading muscles is so inspiring. So thank you so much for all the work that you do in helping us to grow readers. I appreciate you so much and I know so many of our listeners do too.

John Patrick Green Thank you, thank you for having me.

Show Notes

Publisher’s Book Summary: InvestiGators fans, rejoice and get ready to dive into the third volume of Agents of S.U.I.T.! With more than three million copies of InvestiGators in print, readers are primed for more GatorVerse action!

The first two volumes of AGENTS OF S.U.I.T. turned the spotlight to eager rookie agent Cilantro and the un-B-lievably B-loved B-Team of Bongo and Marsha. Now, in the globetrotting third book, new recruit Zeb the sheep joins the flock to help crack the greatest mystery of all! But, uhh…just what is the greatest mystery of all?

Pondering that conundrum is what has kept the dearly departed General Inspectre tethered to Earth long after he should have moved on to the great super-spy base in the sky. Having a ghost haunting the halls of S.U.I.T. wouldn’t be so bad…except he’s possessed Monocle to serve as his Earthly form! Zeb–along with Cilantro, Bongo, Marsha, and cameos from everyone’s favorite Gators–must decipher the series’ biggest mystery EVER to free their pal and finish the Inspectre’s unfinished business!

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About the Author

John Patrick Green grew up on Long Island and has worked in New York City ever since graduating from School of Visual Arts for Graphic Design in 1997. He was the comics consultant for Disney Adventures magazine, and in addition to Disney has written, illustrated, or otherwise worked on comics for Nickelodeon, Dreamworks, Scholastic, DC Comics, and First Second Books. John is the writer and artist of the graphic novels Hippopotamister, the Eisner-nominated Kitten Construction Company series, and the New York Times-bestselling InvestiGators series. He is also the artist and co-creator of the graphic novels Jax Epoch and the Quicken Forbidden, and Teen Boat!, both with writer Dave Roman.

See more of John’s work at www.johngreenart.com.